Today is the Super Duper Blue Red Full Eclipse Partial Eclipse Moon, depending on where you may be viewing from.

Three years ago this day was my last day of working and I retired after 46 years of full-time work. I've enjoyed every single moment of my retirement since then - three years and hoping for twenty more, we'll see how things go...

February and March can be cruel months in southeastern Wisconsin where I live. January itself was nutso here weather-wise, with two separate thaws. I don't ever remember getting two January thaws before, and many years none happened at all.

Before I know it I'll be headed to Las Vegas to visit my friends and celebrate some sunshine and warm weather, and see a show (I always try to squeeze one in). Meanwhile, I am continuing, slowly, to make this smaller retirement ranch into a home that makes me smile in every room. I still have lots to do, including major painting projects. I keep putting them off. Seems at 66 I'm not so keen on painting as I was at 36. Gee, I wonder why...

Jan

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Going Birdy

Before I tore my bedroom apart, I used to have a lovely single large print (about 24 x 24) stationed above the center of my bed. It featured two birds and had a sort of "oriental" feel to it:

Well, you can't really see the print clearly here, but this was the ONLY thing I had hanging on the walls in my bedroom after it was repainted to this "Powder Puff" color (Sears Easy Living Satin Finish paint) in November, 2009. I had bought the paint in 2007, meaning, always, to just get around to repainting my room, to banish once and for all the bubble-gum pink I'd painted it 19 years before! But I never got around to it until I put the house on the market in November 2009 and hired Kevin the handyman to do all sorts of things around here that badly needed to be done!

Kevin, oh Kevin, I miss you so much! Why, oh why, did you have to go back to a full-time well-paying job with good benefits, leaving me and dozens of other customers bereft of your services???

Sorry for that - sometimes I get distracted, darlings.

After the recent tear-down and reconstruct, my bedroom currently looks like this:

Wow!
As you can see, I've been a Busy Beaver (har!) Okay, enough of the off-color references.

As you can also see, nowhere now to place wall art above my headboard unless I suspend something from the ceiling, and I aint gonna do that.

And, because of the configuration of the room and it's smallish space (11 x 14), with the: (1) entrance door and mini-hallway, (2) closet door, (3) two windows, and (4) angled bed, limited as to how I can configure the art work. I've much less wall space now to hang art work and such than before.

I would like to keep the large bird print in the room, if possible. Which leads me to the other birds in my life --

Prior to a mini-revamp after our second trip to New York City in 2009, I used to have these prints hanging in the guest room. After that "revamp", they were stashed in that same black hole of a closet from which I pulled out the two lamp shade (another post). To photograph these birdy prints, I arranged them on my old light grey carpet) in the "den":

There is something about each of them that just speaks to me, I find them so compelling. So beautiful. They are greeting card covers that, over the years, I either sent to people or received from people. I saved them and eventually framed them. Seems I have a thing for birds. Wonder what that means...

The black/gold frames are old. I bought those prior to 1986; I don't remember exactly what year I bought them, but they once resided in an apartment I lived in during my undergrad years. I graduated from college in 1980. The dark wood frames are Walgreens purchased in c. 2005 or 2006.

These cheap Walgreens frames (in the junk room den) currently hold some of Mr. Don's fab photos from our first trip to NYC in 2005, when he was still working with his old FILM camera (we had not yet moved into the digital age during that trip, but it was during that trip that we realized we should do so...)

At some point or other I printed the photos off in black and white, because my old scanner (since junked), refused to do anything in colors other than fuchia and white. Trns out they worked fabously in the down brown/off white of these fames. The top and bottom photos were taken at sunset in Times Square; the center photo was taken at the well-known circular fountain at Columbia and Fifth Avenue. I'm sure going to use them somewhere else in the house because they are both personally precious and really really great photos. Maybe in the guest room, which has sort of evolved into a New York Remembrances room. But I may need to find new frames for them, because...

...I am thinking about reframing those birdy cards in the frames that hold the New York pictures and rehanging them somewhere in my newly-rearranged bedroom.

But wait, you say, there are only three frames shown in your photo (above).

So true, so true, mon amis! I accumulated these frames (and identical frames, but in black), from Walgreens over the years, at $5 each (spectacular bargain!!!) Finally, one recent day when I stopped in at my neighborhood Walgreens and went to the aisle where the photo stuff is, there were NO such frames left. OH NO!

I had, though, managed to locate and purchase a fourth brown frame during a prior expedition. Where there is a will, there is a way!

But wait!!! I discovered last night in a stash of family tree research tucked away on a shelf on one of the deep bookcases in the family room, yet a FIFTH brown frame, still in its Walgreens bag! When did I buy it? Total blank-out. Anyway, an abundance of riches! And just for the hell of it, because I was giddy for not having taken my blood pressure meds a week or so ago, I went to Walgreens in the Shoppes at Grande Avenue downtown one lunch hour and picked up a black frame (identical in structure). It was the only such frame of its kind, and still at $5. I could not resist.

So now I have an odd-out brown frame and an odd-out black frame. Can inspiration be far behind???

Ahem! Back to the point. If I re-hang the birdies, where do I put them??? Which begs the question, because now I need to get off this damn computer and actually start doing some real work, like reframing my birdy prints.

2017 Christmas Tree

2016 Christmas Tree

2014 Christmas Mantle/Mantel

2014 Front Porch

About Me

I'm one of the founders of Goddesschess, which went online May 6, 1999. I earned an under-graduate degree in history and economics going to college part-time nights, weekends and summer school while working full-time, and went on to earn a post-graduate degree (J.D.) I love the challenge of research, and spend my spare time reading and writing about my favorite subjects, travelling and working in my gardens. My family and my friends are most important in my life. For the second half of my life, I'm focusing on "doable" things to help local chess initiatives, starting in my own home town. And I'm experiencing a sort of personal "Renaissance" that is leaving me rather breathless...